Tag Archives: reduce-telco-costs

The ROI of Call-Backs (3 of 4): Reduced Telco Cost  

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The ROI of Call-Backs: Reduced Telco Cost  This is the third post in our series on the ROI of adding call-backs to your call center. Each post looks at one of the paths to cost reduction or revenue lift.

We’re purposefully putting aside the “softer” benefits of eliminating hold-time, i.e. the increase in customer satisfaction, agent happiness, NPS scores, etc. Those benefits are well understood and, for many companies, sufficient motivation to add call-backs. If you’re one of those companies, the ROI covered in these posts is icing on the cake. For companies where “hard” ROI numbers are the better path to budget approval, these posts will provide the business case you need.

In Part 1, we looked at reducing abandon rates. In Part 2, we looked at decreasing handle time. Today, we’re going to look at reducing telco costs. Continue reading →

Taking Questions on Call-Backs, Visual IVR, Cost-Per-Call

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Taking Questions on Call-Backs, Visual IVR, Cost-Per-CallLast week, we had a terrific joint webinar with our friends at Parature. John Seeds (Parature’s Marketing Director) joined me to talk about “4 Trends to Watch in 2014: Multi-Channel Customer Service.” The whole thing is available on demand here. Thanks to everyone who attended!

We had a lively audience that asked some great questions at the end of the presentations. Since we try to keep a quick pace in these events, I kept my answers fairly short. I’m going to use this blog post to elaborate on some of those questions:

  1. How does Visual IVR relate to call-backs?
  2. What are some ways to reduce cost-per-call?
  3. How is Fonolo’s call-back solution different from other offerings on the market?

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Call-Backs Are a Call Center Cure-All

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Call-Back's Are a Call Center Cure-AllIf your call center has long hold times then study after study tells us that your customer satisfaction is at risk. One way to reduce your average hold time (or ASA which stands “Average Speed to Answer”) is to increase the number of agents. If you have the budget, you can always add as many agents as you need to meet a target ASA. But of course, budgets in the real world are always constrained, so this is not usually a viable solution. That’s especially true if your call center has occasional volume spikes. If you staff to the peak volume, you will have a lot of excess agent capacity at other times. (By the way, dealing with volume spikes was exactly the topic of yesterday’s webinar with Bright Horizons.)

So if you’re stuck with an ASA that’s endangering your customer experience, the best option is to give your callers the choice of receiving a call-back from the next available agent. The reaction we’ve seen from callers, when they hear that a company is offering them a call-back option is always very positive. A recent study from Forrester found that 75% of customers think the option of a call-back is “highly appealing”.

But call-backs can do much more than just ease the pain of hold-time. Here are 3 other reasons you should consider adding them to your call center:

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What Matters Most to Your Call Center?

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What Matters Most to Your Call Center?The answer is simple: it all boils down to performance and the effect it has on the customer experience. There are three things we can all agree with when it comes to phoning a contact center:

  1. Callers don’t like to be on hold
  2. Agents don’t enjoy talking to callers who have been on hold
  3. No call center wants to have long hold times

In a perfect world, your organization would always have enough agents to handle the number of incoming calls. However, this isn’t realistic in a typical call center. Spikes in call volume can and do occur, and the end result is a poor customer service experience. This is something that all service organizations should avoid, particularly since 35% of customers will stop doing business with a company after a poor experience. Continue reading →